"Dunsany, Lord - Exiles Club, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

table in the banqueting-hall of the basement of that strange
club. Merely to see them was much, but to hear their story
that their owners told was to go back in fancy to epic times
on the romantic border of fable and fact, where the heroes
of history fought with the gods of myth. The famous silver
horses of Gilgianza were there climbing their sheer
mountain, which they did by miraculous means before the time
of the Goths. It was not a large piece of silver but its
workmanship outrivaled the skill of the bees.
A yellow Emperor had brought out of the East a piece of
that incomparable porcelain that had made his dynasty famous
though all their deeds are forgotten, it had the exact shade
of the right purple.
And there was a little golden statuette of a dragon
stealing a diamond from a lady, the dragon had the diamond
in his claws, large and of the first water. There had been
a kingdom whose whole constitution and history were founded
on the legend, from which alone its kings had claimed their
right to the sceptre, that a dragon stole a diamond from a
lady. When its last king left that country, because his
favourite general used a peculiar formation under the fire
of artillery, he brought with him the little ancient image
that no longer proved him a king outside that singular club.
There was the pair of amethyst cups of the turbaned King
of Foo, the one that he drank from himself, and the one that
he gave to his enemies, eye could not tell which was which.
All these things the ex-King of Eritivaria showed me,
telling me a marvellous tale of each; of his own he had
brought nothing, except the mascot that used once to sit on
the top of the water tube of his favourite motor.
I have not outlined a tenth of the splendour of that
table, I had meant to come again and examine each piece of
plate and make notes of its history; had I known that this
was the last time I should wish to enter that club I should
have looked at its treasures more attentively, but now as
the wine went round and the exiles began to talk I took my
eyes from the table and listened to strange tales of their
former state.
He that has seen better times was usually a poor tale to
tell, some mean and trivial thing that has been his undoing,
but they that dined in that basement had mostly fallen like
oaks on nights of abnormal tempest, had fallen mightily and
shaken a nation. Those who had not been kings themselves,
but claimed through an exiled ancestor, had stories to tell
of even grander disaster, history seeming to have mellowed
their dynasty's fate as moss grows over an oak a great while
fallen. There were no jealousies there as so often there
are among kings, rivalry must have ceased with the loss of
their navies and armies, and they showed no bitterness
against those that had turned them out, one speaking of the